Phoenix’s Alpha Zulu Is Equal Parts Jarring and Rapturous

Phoenix is a very French band. The Louvre is a very French museum. As bewildering as it may sound, it seemed inevitable for the indie-pop quartet to connect themselves to such a cultural behemoth this French. After all, their most popular song references the construction of the Eiffel Tower at Paris’ first Exposition Universelle. Viewed through this lens, the group’s seventh record, Alpha Zulu, presents itself as a culmination. They may have already headlined Coachella in 2013. They may have an excellent, career-spanning oral history penned by the venerable music critic Laura Snapes. Phoenix making an album inside the Louvre, though, feels like a pro forma apogee.

Guitarists/brothers Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai and bassist/keyboardist Deck d’Arcy sheltered themselves in an empty, nocturnal Louvre during lockdown to make Alpha Zulu. Isolated in the beatific Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the three friends found themselves surrounded by gaudy sculptures and world-famous paintings. “I was a bit afraid, when there was too much beauty around us, that to create something could be a bit hard,” Mazzalai said in press materials, speaking to the Versailles band’s initial trepidation. “But it was the opposite: We couldn’t stop producing music.” Especially once vocalist Thomas Mars joined them in early 2021, writing kicked into full gear. It marks their first new music since the death of their frequent producer and de facto fifth member Philippe Zdar, and it’s the first album they’ve produced entirely themselves.

For a band who are so heavily associated with the festival-indie boom of the late aughts and early ’10s, Phoenix’s career arc has been riveting to watch. Countless other bands have tried and failed to emulate them, but they have persevered. They’ve adapted their idiosyncratic sound to suit various environs, whether that’s the glossy sheen of Bankrupt! or the gelato-obsessed Italo-disco of Ti Amo. Alpha Zulu, by contrast, doesn’t quite stake a claim in any single style. Aside from its recording setting, there’s nothing unifying about its sonic landscape, as it constantly shifts from one mood to another throughout its 10 tracks. It never settles, which is occasionally a defect but, for the most part, a strength.

These stark vagaries, on a deeper listen, may resonate as the album’s identity itself. To put it another way, its lack of focus is its actual focus. In a recent GQ profile, Mars expressed a similar perspective. The frontman described Alpha Zulu as “full of ideas that were really spread out and shouldn’t belong together,” likening it to their 2000 debut, United. That comparison makes sense just by listening to “Funky Squaredance” solo.

Consequently, it’s an album rife with contradictions and anomalies, but that makes it entertaining, too. Take the title track, a song featuring Mars’ best caterwauling Isaac Brock impression that contrasts the debonair cool Phoenix usually exhibits. Directly following it is “Tonight,” which sees the quartet putting on the nostalgia goggles to resemble their Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix iteration. Its chorus’ guitar line evokes classics like “Armistice” and “Lasso,” and Phoenix double down on the sheer Big Indie of it all with an Ezra Koenig cameo, the first time a guest vocalist has ever been featured on a Phoenix song. Within its first two tracks, Alpha Zulu establishes itself as an album that defies taxonomy. The result is as jarring as it is rapturous.